Hashtags Increasingly Popular on Facebook

After searching through another round of hashtag data, Socialbakers has found that posting with hashtags on Facebook has become an increasingly popular thing to do. Meanwhile, tweets use hashtags about as often as they did this time last year, and Instagram is the only network where a significant percentage of posts use more than 2 hashtags.

Hashtags become more popular on Facebook, data shows

At Socialbakers, we've always been curious about hashtags. They make content
easy to find, join larger conversations, and allow for audience participation.
They're the interactive tagline, except in the world of social communication you
can find out whenever someone makes a joke that ends in “Where's the beef?”
After hearing feedback from our earlierhashtagarticles,
we wanted to see how we could clarify the topic some.

By examining 12,509 Facebook profiles and 865 Twitter profiles in February
2013 and February 2014, we found that brands on Facebook have expanded their
use of hashtags exponentially. Brands’ Twitter profiles, however, are using
hashtags at about the same rate they did last year.

This reveals several probable conclusions. First of all, Twitter marketers
have had more experience using hashtags on that platform. That there haven’t
been major changes in the numbers like on Facebook means that brands on Twitter
have figured out the best way to use hashtags over time, and on Twitter's end,
that this aspect of their service is, for now, static.

Facebook Posts

On Facebook though, the difference is stark. There was a 525%
increase in the share of all posts to include hashtagged content.
Facebook only integrated hashtags shortly before our first data sampling was
collected, so this illustrates how much the concept has caught on. Keep in mind,
though, that this refers to relative numbers – shares of a total number of
posts, independent of the number of brands sampled – so the number of
hashtagged posts on Twitter could still outstrip the number of hashtagged posts
on Facebook.

Check out our ultimate guide to hashtags!

This means that a concept developed by Twitter, specifically made for a
micro-blogging platform reliant on content more so than networking, has been
imported with immense success by its rival platform, which is more about
networking than content. It is interesting to note that some habits traveled
with the hashtag in the move, namely that the number of hashtags per post has
held somewhat constant between the two networks.

How many Hashtags?

In previous posts, we made some claims that argued for, let’s call it,
‘hashtagging in moderation,’ both generally and for specific networks. This
originally
referred to Instagram, which our new data has offered another light on.
Instagram, it turns out, is the only one of the three networks with a diverse
spread of numbers of hashtags per post.

A thin majority of hashtagged posts use only 1–2 tags, and 10% use 10 or
more. This strongly contrasts with Twitter and Facebook’s pat­terns. This is
likely due in part to the difference between the networks' posting formats.

Twitter’s numbers make the most sense – when you only get
140 characters to play with, every one is at a premium. Having more than
2 hashtags means less space in your tweet for content, @ tags, and links.

But on Facebook, the number of hashtags used per hashtagged post doesn't
quite fit with that logic, since the posting limit is longer than Twitter's.

Interactions per Hashtag on Instagram and Twitter

While all of this information is good to know, and shows just how far
Facebook users have come in integrating the hashtag into that network, it
doesn’t say anything about how effective this increase has been.

To try and answer that question, we also gathered data about the number of
interactions all the posts issued by these brands gathered during February
2014. Our data showed that on Instagram, posts with 1–2 hashtags
received the most interactions, and posts with no hashtags received the
next most. On Twitter, posts with 3–4 hashtags received the most
interactions, followed by posts with 1–2 hashtags, and none,
respectively. But just like we cautioned in our first Instagram report, when
posts with no hashtags seemed to perform better than posts with 10 or more,
these numbers do not necessarily mean that hashtags decrease engagement over
time. Some reasons for this discrepancy are:

Post Quality: Some posts are just better made than others.

Posting Time: A hashtagged post released at the worst time will likely do
worse than a non-hashtagged post released at the best time.

Post Type: Image and Video posts tend to get more interactions than
text-only posts, hashtags or otherwise.

Poster’s History: Maybe the poster needs to drastically raise their
Engagement Rate, and so is going on a ‘hail mary’ hashtag frenzy.

You get the point. Based on all we know, hashtags are not only becoming more
popular with brand pages on Facebook, and remaining popular on Twitter –
there’s probably a good reason why.

For more insights like these, come join Socialbakers and industry leaders
like Twitter, Youtube, KLM, Lenovo, and more, at Engage London 2014. Registration closes
next week, so be sure to get your tickets today.

Company

Sign In

The content on this page is available only to signed-in users. Simply sign in to gain access to all materials in
the Socialbakers Resources. Once signed-in, you will then be able to access and download various types of
studies, reports, articles and other types of content for free.